Heading down Mexico Way

 Pima County Fairgrounds—Tucson AZ  February 2, 2015

Our Seattle Seahawks lost the Super Bowl yesterday in the last minute—really too bad; it was a very exciting game though and congrats to the New England Patriots!

Let’s backtrack to January 23 when we left Olympia for the rendezvous here in Tucson for the Escapees RV Club Chapter 8 Mexican Connection Rally to Kino Bay, Sonora, Mexico.  We made a quick stop at McCoy Freightliner in Portland, OR for a check-up on the Sprinter and did a wheel alignment check at Les Schwab Tire, where we found out that the unsteadiness on the road was probably caused by having the front tires overinflated--now at 55 psi (instead of 80 psi) it seems to be a lot better.  We stayed the night at Roland and Jen’s and drove the next day to the Elks Lodge in Red Bluff, CA.  We noticed on the way down how terribly dry it is in California. The reservoir at Shasta dam was 50% down and Mount Shasta was covered with snow but it looked more like this over 12,000’ peak looks in the summer!

 On Sunday the 25^th we stopped at the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge. This time of the year it is full with snow geese and white fronted geese, stopping here on the Pacific flyway. It was very foggy but it still made for some great pictures of thousands of geese in the meadows and the inundated grain fields. There were more shorebirds and ducks and a very wet hawk sitting in a tree.

We stayed the night at John, Amy and Rachel’s house, and had John’s great taco dinner and a Skype conversation with Eleanor up at Central Washington University in Ellensburg.

We had planned to make some visits in Novato, but people weren’t home so we used Monday morning to visit Rosie the Riveter National Historic Park in Richmond. We have been here several times, but had found out they finally got their new permanent exhibits installed just before the end of the year, which are really excellent, and also had some new movies and close by is the restored Victory Ship Red Oak. We didn’t visit that this time but have been there before. This park is very interesting, not just talking about the “Rosies” during WWII, but also the history of Richmond and the Kaiser Shipyards during the World War II years. The Visitor Center is in a part of the old Ford Assembly plant that made tanks and other military vehicles.

After a visit to Maryke’s Aunt Yvonne in Berkeley we made it to Kit Fox RV Park, a Passport America campground in Patterson off I-5 where we had stayed before.  On January 27 we drove to Simi Valley for another visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. We are members (which gives us free admission to all other NARA Presidential Libraries) and always enjoy visiting this great museum.

Reagan's Oval Office

Reagan and Gorbachev

We talked for a long time with one of the docents in the “Oval Office” and learned a lot of new things about Reagan. They also had a really neat exhibit of old Hollywood movie cars from the Peterson Car Museum in LA, several used in movies (Sabrina, Thelma and Louise and others) and a beautiful 1929 Rolls.

1953 Nash Healey used in Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden

1929 Rolls Royce owned in the 50's by Fred Astaire

We camped at the Simi Valley Elks Lodge and the next day had lunch with Maryke’s sister in Laguna Woods and then on to Oceanside Elks Lodge, where they even have a laundry, so no extra trip!

Since we didn’t have to be in Tucson until the second of February, we could take it a little slower now. We stopped in Algodones (Baja CA, Mexico) for some meds after staying in a very funky Passport America park in Winterhaven. They had raised the price by 50% in a year, was not worth it! We found out that the liquor stores in Algodones don’t sell alcohol before 11AM, so no vodka to replace the bottle in our rig, oh well…. We wanted to be early so we didn’t have a long wait to return to the US, and we didn’t want to stay there for more than an hour. Fortunately the US line was very short.  The weather was getting very threatening and started to rain a lot.

We had seen on the AZ map a BLM site close to Gila Bend called the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site. We had been here many years ago when it was a 12 mile dirt road and very desolate. Now there was a beautiful paved road all the way to the site and a very big campground with 60+ sites, very inexpensive as well, $8/night (so $4 with our Golden Age pass)—dry camping of course but great and very quiet. The Petroglyph site is a big mountain of boulders, full of petroglyphs pecked out in the desert varnish. We had never seen so many of them, probably several thousands, and according to the interpretive signs up to ten thousand years old. Along with lots of archaic geometric and abstract designs (the oldest ones), also “Gila style” human and animal forms, like people, deer, lizards and snakes as you’ll see in our photographs. We were discovering more and more of them and walked around for over an hour.

Back in the rig after dinner it started pouring and basically rained the whole night. The next day we noticed how green the desert vegetation is getting; it should be a fantastic wildflower year this spring!

In the fog and rain we drove to Picacho Peak, 40 miles north of Tucson, an Arizona State Park with electric hookups for RVs, water and a dump. So we could arrive “full and empty” at the Pima County Fairgrounds in Tucson.  Unfortunately it rained constantly and then Sunday morning was totally socked in with fog so no pix of this very interesting place!  Moving south towards Tucson we stopped for some shopping then arrived about 2PM at Pima County Fairgrounds on the very southern edge of Tucson.    A lot of the campsites were waterlogged and heavy big motorhomes were not advised to park, but the sun will be shining now and in the mid-70s for the rest of the week. We managed to park our little rig on hard gravel, then noticed they only had 50amp plugs so we had to buy an adapter from 50A to 30A, that we probably need for the future anyhow. Really good TV coverage with our antenna and the first station coming on was NBC, so with a frozen pizza in our little toaster oven we were ready for the Super Bowl game! 
Today the rest of our 26 rigs are coming in and we have our first meeting at 5PM.  We go to the border at Nogales tomorrow to get our Mexican FMMs or tourist permits.  We have a catered dinner that night then Wed. is a free day for laundry, fuel, groceries etc.  Thursday morning we cross into Mexico in 4 groups and we’re leading one.  Then the excitement really begins as we head to Bahía Kino, about 235 miles south of the border for nearly 2 weeks, then we’re going down to San Carlos and finally the terrific colonial town of Alamos with one or more other rigs then back to Tucson around 3/1 and the Escapade here at the Fairgrounds. More from Mexico!